March 9th–17th

Blog

Back for a second year is the Poster Session, a more intimate approach to presentation in the form of a poster on the wall. Attendees are welcome to the session to peruse around, check out what people are doing, view demos, trade experiences, and talk one-on-one with the presenter.

We are proud to announce that the PyCon Program Guide is available on
your Apple iOS and Android devices, via the Conventionist app from
Proxima Labs (Conventionist). This app is free of charge,
commercial free, and once the program is downloaded, will not require
your data plan or wireless.

We had a torrent of interest when we announced Startup Row for PyCon 2011. At that time, we only had six or seven companies to start. Well, due to the immense interest, we are happy to announce the final slate of entrants for Startup Row at PyCon 2011 - fifteen different startups that are making it happen with Python.

We’re a week away from PyCon and need a little help from you, the community. The conference doesn’t run itself, so we need a team of volunteers to act as a support staff to keep each session on track. The duties are simple yet vital to the success of the conference. You’ll help keep an eye on the clock, make sure everyone is in the right place, give the audience a voice, and get a front seat.

Another Chicagoan making the drive to Atlanta is the man behind the PyCon videos, Carl Karsten of Next Day Video. After a discovery in 2008 at a Debian conference, he found a more productive video process that he took to every Chicago-area user group that would let him try it out, which got him to where he is with today’s PyCon video team.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. See the first post for an introduction to the series and a description of the Django virtual track. The second post focused on the web working virtual track. The third post focused on the Python and NoSQL virtual track. This post focuses on the fourth virtual track, Networking and Concurrency.

This is the third in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. The first post introduced the series and discussed the Django virtual track. The second post focused on the web working virtual track. This post focuses on the third virtual track, Python and NoSQL.

This is the second in a series of posts about the schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. The first post introduced the series and discussed the Django virtual track. This post focuses on the second virtual track, web working.

After weeks of work, we have finalized a schedule for PyCon 2011. In designing this schedule, we found that there are actually 10 different conferences happening in parallel at PyCon. We are going to tell you about them all.

PyCon is only a few weeks away, so I decided to interview one of the speakers for this year’s convention. In this discourse you can learn about Michael Foord’s talk about mock and what he likes about PyCon in general. Michael Foord is probably best known for his work in the IronPython community and for writing a book on IronPython. He is also the author of the mock library.

Putting together two talks for a conference like PyCon is certainly no easy task, nor is it easy to pile on a lightning talk and the organization of a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session or two. That’s Geremy Condra’s plan for March 11 through March 13 at PyCon.

People are asking about the cap for PyCon this year. The answer is that we have approximately three hundred and fifty spaces left. So no, we are not sold out at PyCon yet - but things are moving so fast (and we are receiving so many questions) that we thought it was worth opening our kimono a little bit and letting you see into the underbelly of planning for an event like PyCon.

It’s not the first time Dave Beazley made the drive from Chicago to PyCon, but it’s the first time he buckled up a piece of history to join him on the trip. After giving two tutorials on Python 3, Dave brings out his 1979 OSI Superboard II for an old school meets new school mashup which is sure to raise a few eyebrows and bring back memories for some.

As PyCon approaches, the blogger community was invited to interview the speakers that are coming to the event. I chose Wesley Chun, writer of “Core Python Programming” and co-author of “Python Web Development with Django”. In this interview, I ask Wesley about his talk, Running Django Apps on Google App Engine and about PyCon in general. Let’s see what he has to say:

The Python world has come a long way since December 2008 when 3.0 was first released. Books have been released, blogs have been written, and most importantly, projects have been ported. Recently, NumPy and SciPy checked in their porting work. We’ve heard rumblings of Django on 3.x, possibly as early as this summer. Python 3.1.3 was released in the fall and 3.2 final is around a week away, and with 2.7 being the end of the 2.x line, all core hands are on Python 3.

Coming over from France for his 4th PyCon is packaging and distribution guru, Tarek Ziadé. When he’s not spending his time on Mozilla work, he’s leading the Distutils2 project, maintains the shutil and sysconfig standard libraries, and organizes PyCon France. On top of all of that, he found time to put together two talks: an extreme talk on packaging, and one on the Firefox Sync project.

It’s not often that “April Fools” jokes go past the joke stage, especially in the Python community. PEP-3117 didn’t make it, and Uncle Barry’s PEP-401 takeover hasn’t yet occurred. However, we’re still seeing the work of an April 1, 2010 joke in the form of Flask, Armin Ronacher’s micro-framework.

PyCon 2011 is breaking records already - but we're still on the lookout for more excellent sponsors to join our already impressive list of sponsors - if you are part of a business, and you want to reach out to over a thousand Python enthusiasts - PyCon is the place to do so.

PyCon early bird rates may be gone - but registration continues to be open (we have not hit our max attendance, yet) and hotel registration, tutorial registration, etc continues to be open. We are also signing up even more sponsors and affiliates!

Choosing the tutorials this year was especially difficult, as we needed
to cut the number of proposals by half to fit into our limited space.
The quality of the proposals (and the proposed presenters) was
outstanding, and there was a lot of heartburn that resulted from the
difficult decisions we had to make to come to our list of tutorials for
PyCon 2011.

This year, however, we were helped by looking at the results of a poll we
put out in mid December asking about the various topics we had available.
While we would never claim that the poll was scientifically valid or completely
representative of the community, we did find the results, coupled with
experience with previous years very helpful in deciding which topics we
would feature in the PyCon 2011 tutorials.

Wednesday AM (7)

Python 101

Pinax Solutions

Web2py Secrets

Scientific Python Tools not only for Scientists and Engineers

Distributed and Cloud computing with Python

Building your own tile server using OpenStreetMap

Advanced Python I

Wednesday PM (7)

Google App Engine workshop

Python For Total Beginners Using "Learn Python The Hard Way"

Mining and Visualizing Data from the Social Web with Python

Advanced Python II

Packet Crafting with Python

Packaging, Documenting, and Distributing your Python Codebase

Geospatial Computation and Visualization Cooperative Lab

Thursday AM (7)

Hands on Beginning Python

Mastering Python 3 I/O

Creating GUI Applications in Python using Qt I

Python/Django deployment workshop

Applied Machine Learning in Python with scikit-learn

Doing Data Structures in Python

(Re-)Introduction to C for Pythonistas

Thursday PM (7)

Hands on Intermediate Python

Cooking with Python 3

Creating GUI Applications in Python using Qt II

Faster Python Programs through Optimization

Writing Python extensions in C

Deploying web applications to the cloud

Documenting Your Project With Sphinx

Congratulations to these tutorial presenters!

Based on the feedback we described, we grouped these into a number of themes, as shown below.

We are trying something new this year -- getting some pre-feedback to help guide our tutorial selection process. We have a poll up at where you can vote for the tutorials that you think we should offer.

I'm very pleased to announce that the PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals for both the main conference talks, and tutorials is closed. Actually, it technically closed November 1st - but we've got great news.

The poster session created a great buzz at PyCon 2010 and it's back for 2011! Posters are a great way to share your project with everyone at PyCon, but in a more interactive and one-on-one style. Poster proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis until the limit of 35 is reached, so consider offering a poster!

The call for tutorial proposals is open until November 1st and we want to encourage you to submit a class idea! Teachers are paid for their efforts and it's a great opportunity for you to teach to a room full of people who have paid to hear what you have to say!

PyCon 2011 will be held March 9th through the 17th, 2011 in Atlanta,
Georgia. (Home of some of the best southern food you can possibly
find on Earth!) The PyCon conference days will be March 11-13,
preceded by two tutorial days (March 9-10), and followed by four
days of development sprints (March 14-17).